knowing and not knowing

The other day I happened across a very small notebook that had five pages of handwritten text in it. These were the first notes I jotted down for a work from 2008 called Gertrud. It was strange to see just how similar the outcome of the project was to these initial thoughts, as if the choreographic process was a matter of executing ideas.

Such knowing in the process of making choreography is in direct contrast to the work that Chisato Ohno, Jackie Shemesh and I are doing for Pause. Listen.. Here, the project is constantly adapting and shifting, informed by different spaces or rooms, and changes in our interests and experience. It is much more a process of not knowing in which the work is constantly re-made for different environments and times. In the Founders’ studio at The Place in London it is a matter of finding different kinds of sensory frames — light, sound, space and movement — that might build on, in and around Chisato’s delicate, spacious and complex dancing.